Saturday, November 5, 2011

Spotted: MUSE to sift the emails of yesteryear

Interesting tool from Jeff Heer and others at Stanford. 

MUSE to sift the emails of yesteryear

A software tool called Memories Using Email (MUSE) lets you dig through your email archive and reminisce on your digital past

Dev: Codecademy Lands $2.5 Million From Investors

Online js learning, diversifying to other languages. 

Codecademy Lands $2.5 Million From Investors

Codecademy, a service that lets people take free online coding classes, is getting a large vote of confidence from the investor community.

Find: A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills and Make Money

Focused on data mining, but certainly viz has a role. 

A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills and Make Money

Kaggle connects data scientists with organizations that need someone to extract meaning from their data, like insurance companies that want to know the likelihood that a patient will be hospitalized.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Tool: ScriptCover: Javascript coverage analysis tool


ScriptCover: Javascript coverage analysis tool

We are pleased to announce the open source release of a Javascript coverage analysis tool called ScriptCover. It is a Chrome extension that provides line-by-line Javascript code coverage statistics for web pages in real time without user modification of the site. Results are collected when the page loads and continue to be updated as users interact with the page. These results can be viewed in real time through a reporting tool which highlights the executed lines of code for detailed analysis. ScriptCover is useful when performing manual and automated testing and in understanding and debugging complex code.

Short report in Chrome extension popup, detailing both overall scores and per-script coverage.


Sample of annotated source code from the detailed report. First two columns are line number and number of times each instruction has been executed.

Tool: Test Your Mobile Web Apps with WebDriver - A Tutorial


Test Your Mobile Web Apps with WebDriver - A Tutorial

Mobile testing has come a long way since the days when testing mobile web applications was mostly manual and took days to complete. Selenium WebDriver is a browser automation tool that provides an elegant way of testing web applications. WebDriver makes it easy to write automated tests that ensure your site works correctly when viewed from an Android or iOS browser.

For those of you new to WebDriver, here are a few basics about how it helps you test your web application. WebDriver tests are end-to-end tests that exercise a web application just like a real user would. There is a comprehensive user guide on the Selenium site that covers the core APIs.

#more 

Now let’s talk about mobile! WebDriver provides a touch API that allows the test to interact with the web page through finger taps, flicks, finger scrolls, and long presses. It can rotate the display and provides a friendly API to interact with HTML5 features such as local storage, session storage and application cache. Mobile WebDrivers use the remote WebDriver server, following a client/server architecture. The client piece consists of the test code, while the server piece is the application that is installed on the device.

Get Started

WebDriver for Android and iPhone can be installed following these instructions. Once you’ve done that, you will be ready to write tests. Let’s start with a basic example using www.google.com to give you a taste of what’s possible.

The test below opens www.google.com on Android and issues a query for “weather in san francisco”. The test will verify that Google returns search results and that the first result returned is giving the weather in San Francisco.

public void testGoogleCanGiveWeatherResults() {  // Create a WebDriver instance with the activity in which we want the test to run.  WebDriver driver = new AndroidDriver(getActivity());  // Let’s open a web page  driver.get("http://www.google.com");

Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion

Quite an interesting video visualizing population growth to 7 billion. -